Fresh Modern Countryside Outdoor Wedding

These fine art wedding photographs by Nikki’s Moments today will have you dreaming of summer days; fresh, bright, breezy and romantic. In fact, summer couples, be prepared to go on a Pinterest frenzy thanks to the delicate styling and outdoor setting, it’s all so beautiful.

The florals just have to be my favourite element of their day. Big blousy white flowers were used throughout, including roses, peonies and hydrangeas with a dose of greenery. Stephanie’s bouquet was a triumph and looked incredible with her tulle gown. What a gorgeous couple, stylish wedding party and right roaring party.

THE PROPOSAL | On a surprise trip to beautiful Venice for my 30th birthday, Andy decided to get down on one knee on a Gondola, after spending months designing my dream ring, incorporating 2 diamonds from both of my late Nan’s engagement rings.

THE VISION | A relaxed, fun outdoor wedding with close family and best friends, in our perfect surroundings, the countryside!

THE PLANNING PROCESS | We enjoyed the planning process, we did take a lot on ourselves but we loved getting creative, making things and discussing our ideas. We took on quite a laid back approach to the wedding and that definitely worked for us. It helped that we got organised early and then we swore by our bible spreadsheet, for guidance along the way!

BUDGET | We lost track! The key was to not start out a marriage in debt and we achieved this!

THE VENUE | Lodge Farm House, Kings Walden, Hertfordshire.

Lodge Farm House was the first wedding venue we looked at. We booked our date in just 3 weeks after getting engaged, we knew the venue was exactly what we wanted! We loved that you could DIY here. We chose a tipi reception with ‘posh BBQ’ catered by Kingfisher Caterers, after our outdoor ceremony. At Lodge Farm you had the farmhouse for the whole of the weekend, which meant me and my bridesmaids could stay the evening before and have that ‘at home’ feeling. Laura the event contact on the day was absolutely amazing and great fun, she felt like a guest! Lodge Farm is an immaculately maintained homely venue, which looks magical in the evening covered in lit up fairy lights and lanterns.

THE FOOD | Post ceremony canapes were served while guests chatted and drunk fizz in the sunshine. We then had our sit down BBQ (chicken & chorizo skewers, fish skewers, halloumi and med veg and lamb cutlets, all served with sweet potato wedges and salad selections). For the evening food we wanted a festival feel and so we had fish and chip cones being handed out, which went down a treat by that point! All catering was provided by Kingfisher Catering in a small catering tent at the back of the tipi, the quality of food was absolutely spot on and we still have so many compliments now!

THE DRESS & ACCESSORIES | ‘Della’ gown by Watters. I loved the Watters range! I knew that I wanted a tulle skirt and something plain, simple and floaty. This was the only dress that I tried on (and I tried on a lot!) that I felt like me in and that was really important to me. I wore a beaded hair vine, handmade by our florist Stephanie Rose. My Veil; was my ‘something borrowed’ from my bridesmaid Sam, it felt special wearing something that had been a part of her wedding day. I also wore a pair of plain studs, which were a gift from Andy that arrived during bridal prep. Shoes were from Dune.

FINDING THE DRESS | I got on everyone’s nerves, although they never said, but I knew I must have been because I was even beginning to get on my own nerves!! Finding a dress was not an easy task for me and I had apparently left it quite late, in the wedding world! After visiting a few bridal shops and not really liking anything, I began to start searching frantically through Pinterest. I discovered almost every dress I loved was from the Watters brand. I hunted down some stockists and discovered Emma Elizabeth in Twickenham.

My bridesmaid Emma and I decided to book in a day to go visit. I tried on a couple (all Watters) when we arrived and then came to Della, I knew it was the one for me. I went for the plain un-beaded version and Emma the owner gave me a small bag of beads from her collection. My talented Mum offered to sew some of these on the bodice for me and got the amount just right, I loved that she had done this for me, finishing the dress off perfectly. My advice to any bride struggling to find ‘the’ dress, would be to do some brand research online and then find the stockists of those brands.

GROOM’S ATTIRE | Andy’s suit was from Reiss, shoes Russell & Bromley and he also wore an engraved Skagen watch that I had one of the bridesmaids deliver on the morning. He looked so handsome. All of the ushers wore their own navy suits and we tied them in together by gifting them all with matching ties, pocket squares and personalised tie pins. We liked that the Usher’s all had their own style.

THE READINGS & CEREMONY MUSIC | Both my Dad and Brother accompanied me down the aisle, to ‘You’re my Best Friend’ by The Once. I decided on the song about 20 minutes before we had to leave, I had narrowed it down to 3 songs to choose from. I am so indecisive. The song choice was kept a surprise from Andy and this is why the decision was so last minute, he is amazing at getting me to make my own decisions. It was the right choice and I knew as soon as it started playing.

We had 2 readers; my lovely Sister who started the ceremony off with a very emotional ‘On your Wedding Day’ Andy even shed a tear at this point. We then later had Andy’s best friend Mark read Bob Marley’s ‘you’re not perfect’, which reduced me to tears. We left the ceremony to The Lumineers ‘Ho Hey’.

Our first dance was Use Somebody – Kings of Leon. Not your usual first dance kind of song but we love it and we both always say that we met at a time in our lives when we really needed somebody so it was perfect. We didn’t really have any idea what we were going to do and it was something that we just went with on the day. After a few drinks we had a bit of a lift mid-way through that didn’t look as elegant as I had hoped, but was fun! I kind of wish we had had a few practise runs!

MUSIC | The Riff Raffs! Amazing band, found on Alive Network, they were a risk, as they were not a recommendation and we had never heard them live before. They were unbelievable, they had our guests dancing the night away to such a mixture of music and even finished off with some old skool garage that we had requested! 21 seconds being the favourite song of the night.

BEAUTIFUL BRIDESMAIDS | I had 5 gorgeous bridesmaids. My Sister Susie, Andy’s niece Ellie and my 3 best friends Emma, Sam and Gemma. All girls wore pale mint green ASOS dresses, some short, some long, I let them decide as it was important for them to be comfortable and feel nice. They all wore Rose Gold shoes and we gifted them with matching earrings and Katie Loxton clutches. The girls looked stunning. We had Andy’s 4 nieces as flower girls; Lois, Maisie, Edie and baby Robyn, who all wore white Monsoon dresses, with tulle skirts, I said they looked like flower fairies on the day, so beautiful. Edie had earlier had an accidental hair incident, trimming her own fringe, so we had her a flower crown made by Pocket full of Petals to disguise this!

THE FLOWERS | Stephanie Rose in Hitchin, the best around! Stephanie was amazing, easy to work with, a perfectionist and her passion is so noticeable. I never thought the bouquets and button holes would look that good! We stuck with all white and greens. For my bouquet I knew I wanted this to be as big as possible and to include one of my favourite flowers, peonies as they represent happiness. I suggested the dark foliage, as I loved the contrast of colours. My bridesmaids had a smaller versions of my bouquet with added gypsophila and the buttons holes Andy decided on and they looked amazing against the blue suits.

THE CAKE | We wanted to have our cake served as dessert, we were off on honeymoon the next day and didn’t want to have to worry about boxing this up or it going to waste. I contacted Sarah from ‘We R Cakes’ as we regularly visit her tearooms for our favourite chocolate brownies. Together we decided that a brownie stack ‘cake’ would be the perfect choice! We served this with Strawberries from our local fruit farm. Cake topper was from Etsy.

YOUR PHOTOGRAPHER | Nikki’s Moments. We found Nikki on Facebook, she was local to us and came to visit us at our home. We found her friendly and comfortable to be around, which I think is a massive list tick. She showed us some of her work and we loved Nikki’s bright, fresh and timeless style of images, which was exactly what we were after. Nikki and her assistant Jane did a beautiful job of capturing our day naturally, they shot our guests being themselves, and nothing was too posed, just showing how we and others felt at those moments in the day. We will be forever thankful of the memories she captured for us to look back on.

VIDEOGRAPHER | Chris from David Boynton Wedding Photography. We originally hadn’t booked a videographer and a few of our married friends advised us that it was something that they would not skip on. I found Chris on Facebook too, I loved watching through the other trailers he had produced. Chris was Midlands based, but was down South at a wedding the day before ours, so it worked out well! I called Chris my smiley Ninja on the day. You forgot he was even there, we cannot wait to get our video back to watch together.

THE DETAILS & DÉCOR | We decorated the venue ourselves. We love to travel, so we incorporated this into our day, the tables were places we have visited together and we made a table plan map to show where in the world you would be sitting. We kept everything natural and stuck to neutral, whites and greens for our colours. Our budget wasn’t huge for our table flowers and as my Mum used to be a florist we took full advantage. We collected jam jars and milk bottles from family and I wrapped twine around them all. The day before the wedding Mum and I went to the local market and bought everything I loved in white, Mum then carefully created the exact vision I had in my mind. We filled the left over jam jars with play sand and scattered them on tables with candles in to be lit. We also bought flowers to hang off of the tipi poles above the tables and our Dad’s carefully hung all of these, it was so lovely watching everyone getting involved in the decoration. On the tables, all guests had a collected pebble as their name place. My Sister had collected these from the beach outside her home and I hand wrote everyone’s name on them, for a personal touch. We decided to not go with the usual table favours, of a gift. Instead I printed a photograph of a memory that we have with each one of our guests and popped it next to their name place. This got all of our guests chatting and interacting with each other. Finally on the tables, we had a jar, which had sparklers in for our sparkler exit at the end of the night.

Our order of the day Andy and I made from an old pallet that my Dad had managed to locate, it was something different and saved on printing costs. I also made a loved lost one sign, to celebrate the lives of the ones that couldn’t be present.

Ceremony Decoration: My sister knows I love dream catchers. She arrived the day before the wedding with 7 beautifully handmade ones, she had spent weeks creating. We tasked her with the job of decorating the arbour, which she totally transformed into a beautiful archway for us to say our vows under, using her large dream catchers and scattering the smaller ones in the trees.

Everyone commented on the decoration and were shocked when I let on we had DIY’ed it.

Our honeymoon started the day after the wedding, we packed up the venue, met family and friends at our local pub and then drove straight to a spa hotel close to Gatwick. We spent the evening opening our cards and talking about how much we had loved our day, we then flew out early the next morning. It felt like a whirlwind! Our honeymoon would not have been the once in a lifetime trip that it was without the generosity of our guests. We were amazed and taken aback by the donations we received and all of the lovely well wishes and messages.

MEMORABLE MOMENTS | There are so, so many!!

Andy: I loved the welcome in to the tipi Reception as husband and wife, my favourite Michael Jackson song playing and everyone cheering and dancing, the best feeling.

Steph: The exchanging of rings, whilst reading our vows that we had written for each other and when my Dad walked in to collect me, ending up in tears, my Dad isn’t a man that shows his emotion much and I will remember that moment forever.

There was also a moment in the night when the band played Oasis’ Don’t look back in Anger, it ended up that we were standing in the middle of a big circle of tipsy, smiley guests singing along to us and this is one of the most memorable parts of our day. You could feel the love bouncing off of the walls.

ADVICE FOR OTHER COUPLES | Gut feelings all the way and decide on things together. Your wedding should be a mixture of both of your tastes and when you see it all together working perfectly, you see why you both work so well.

Don’t stress over other people’s opinions, it is your day and it should represent what you envision.

The day goes so quickly, spend it together and enjoy every moment, we danced, photo-boothed and went off for drinks together alone and these are some of my favourite memories of the day. Take in every special moment, because you will wake up the next day wanting to do it all again!